(2) The chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable. It is thoroughly-documented that an attack such as 9/11 was entirely foreseeable. Specifically, Al Qaeda flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon was something which American military and intelligence services – and our allies – knew could happen.

(3) U.S. intelligence services have repeatedly infiltrated Al Qaeda and related groups, but then idiotically failed to stop them. For example – as the New York Times, CBS News and others reported – the FBI informant involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center begged the FBI to substitute fake bomb power for real explosives, but his FBI handler moronically let real explosives be used.

Similarly – as reported by Newsweek, the New York Times and others – an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to 2 of the 9/11 hijackers while they were in the U.S., but then stupidly failed to stop them.

Indeed, former counter-terrorism boss Richard Clarke theorizes that top CIA brass tried to recruit the hijackers and turn them to our side, but were unsuccessful. And – when they realized had failed – they covered up their tracks so that the FBI would not investigate their illegal CIA activities , “malfeasance and misfeasance”, on U.S. soil.

In other words, our intelligence services’ attempts to infiltrate and work with people inside of terrorist cells was horribly botched; and they did a horrible job of stopping terrorist attacks once they were set in motion.

(4) Dick Cheney was in charge of all of America’s counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11. See this Department of State announcement and this CNN article. As such, at least part of the blame for failing to stop the attacks is on his shoulders.

According to the New Yorker – a secret document written by the National Security Council (NSC) on February 3, 2001 directed NSC staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy:

“The review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields”.

It is difficult to brush off Cheney’s Energy Task Force’s examination of arab oil maps as a harmless comparison of American energy policy with known oil reserves because the NSC explicitly linked the Task Force, oil, and regime change.

The above-linked New Yorker article quotes a former senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the NSC said:

If this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans.

Is that why idiot Cheney – the guy in charge of all terror protection efforts before and on 9/11 – failed to effectively respond to 9/11 with normal air defense? Was he too busy pining over Iraqi oil maps to pay any attention?

(6) The military – under the idiot Vice President’s command that day – didn’t scramble enough fighter jets, and then scrambled jets far over the Atlantic Ocean, in what Senator Mark Dayton called:

The most gross incompetence and dereliction of responsibility and negligence that I’ve ever, under those extreme circumstances, witnessed in the public sector.

Cheney – and the other people in charge of anti-terror response that day – screwed up big time.

But just like the bank CEOs who are rewarded for causing the financial crisis by being given bailouts and subsidies and breaks, the military and intelligence officials who dropped the ball that day have been promoted. As Time reported:

They have basically promoted the exact same people who have presided over the … failure,” says a former Justice Department official, “and those individuals took the same thinking with them.

As the Washington Post reported, no one from the CIA, FBI or NSA has been reprimanded, punished, or fired for the events of 9/11.

The same is true for the military personnel on watch that day. For example, General Myers, who was Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 11th, was quickly confirmed as Chairman two weeks later. General Ralph Eberhart, Commander in Chief of NORAD at the time of the attack, was promoted to head the new “Northern Command” a year after the attack.

Just as with the financial crisis, no one has been punished, and the people who screwed up have been allowed to fail upwards.

(8) Many of the draconian “national security programs” – such as the Patriot Act, spying on Americans and indefinite detention – overtly approved after 9/11 had actually been implemented or planned before 9/11. September 11th was used as an excuse to ramp up these programs.

These programs were approved during the Bush administration … but were never terminated by the Obama administration. In fact, while Obama is a nicer and smarter guy than Bush, top constitutional law professors say that Obama has actually expandedthese programs. And top national security experts say that these programs actually harm our national security and increase the threat from terrorism. See this and this.

As reported by ACLU, FireDogLake, RawStory and many others, declassified documents shows that Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001

The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) – who led the 9/11 staff’s inquiry – said “At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened“. He also said “I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years…. This is not spin. This is not true.”